Auralux Release For Browsers Shows Emscripten Is Reaching Indie Devs

New submitter MorgyTheMole writes Porting C++/OpenGL based games using Emscripten and WebGL has been an approach pushed by Mozilla for some time now. Games using the technology are compatible with most modern browsers and require no separate install. We've seen Epic Games demonstrate UnrealEngine 4 in browser as well as Unity show off a variety of games. Now as the technology matures, indie devs are looking to get into the mix, including this near one-to-one port of E McNeill's Auralux, a simplified RTS game, from Android and iOS. (Disclosure: I am a programmer who worked on this title.)

Comments

I appreciate your hard work

[Anonymous Coward]

but please leave real development to real developers that use real technologies on real platforms. No, we don't need 8 core machines with 16gb of ram to be able to play a game that late-90s computers could've handled natively. Games do not belong in the browser.

Re:I appreciate your hard work

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh please, the same arguments were made when API's like DirectX first started surfacing. You may as well argue that unless you're programming directly at the assembly level, you're wasting your time.

There are plenty of valid reasons for pushing this technology to the web browser. Nobody's claiming that all your future AAA games will be browser based, but it's currently the best way of making an interactive experience that's not tied to a specific platform. It makes the most sense for indie devs as well, who chances are won't be pushing the hardware to its limits anyway. I don't see you blasting the bigger indie titles like Fez, Towerfall, Braid, etc. because they run like crap for the hardware they require - because your hardware is still plenty fast that it doesn't matter.

That's the bit you have missed - it doesn't matter. Who cares if running native is 10x faster, if you can still get 60FPS?

Re:Works in Safari

[Anonymous Coward]

If you change the user agent to Chrome - Mac. Seems fairly CPU intensive though, managed to get the fans on my MacBookPro spinning up fairly quickly. That could just be the WebGL implementation in Safari not being so crash hot though.

I don't know that Safari's JavaScript engine can optimize for asm.js yet, so I'd guess it's the JavaScript more than the WebGL. Asm.js JavaScript works everywhere, but Firefox and Chrome detect and optimize for asm.js specifically and get really high performance figures as a result.

Just because you can do something

[AuMatar]

Doesn't mean you should. Congratulations- you managed to write your app in the least effective way possible and got both the performance of javascript and the ease of writing code in C++. You are the biggest idiot on slashdot today. Your reward is getting to write a nice check to Dice for the slashvertisement.